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July 7, 2009
Exclusive: What You Hear vs. What You Don’t Hear from the White House
James Carafano, PhD, Presidential Policy: Does It Make the Grade?
It is remarkable that a White House quick to gush over everything the president does is often silent when Obama does the right thing on national security matters. We have seen a couple of examples of that over the last week.
The biggest national security news last week was pretty much not much news at all. U.S. forces left the cities of Iraq turning over responsibility for security to the country’s police and military. There was so little attention to the issues it prompted The Washington Post to ask “have we forgotten Iraq?” The lack of attention is stunning. Winning in Iraq is critical to winning the long war against terrorism.
In part, no one is talking about Iraq because the White House has been almost silent on what arguably has been one of its most successful overseas efforts.
Apparently the White House was not interested in making much news about its plan to announce a policy to indefinitely detain unlawful combatants in the long war. “President Barack Obama is actively considering issuing an executive order authorizing the continued, indefinite detention of terrorism suspects, without trial, according to the Washington Post and Pro Publica,” J.D. Tuccille reported in The Washington Examiner.
The reason the White House is so quiet on these “right moves” is that these necessary and important steps to keeping America safe (finishing the job in Iraq and keeping terrorists off the street) are largely consistent with the policies of the Bush administration.
On the other hand, looking at what Obama does want us to hear about tells a very different story. Last week, for example, the president held a virtual “townhall meeting” healthcare legislation. This initiative also has implications for national security, but unlike U.S. military operations in Iraq, the outcome won’t be good for the American people.
Writing this week in The Washington Examiner I talk about the relationship between healthcare and national security, particularly the impact legislation will have on how the nation responds to pandemics. There is a lot that can be done to prepare for pandemics. The most important is to have a strong, vibrant, and robust national healthcare system. If the plan Obama is trumpeting wins the day it will not only drive the cost of healthcare through the roof and strangle the economy, it will also result in managed, rationed government healthcare. This is not the kind of healthcare system you want to have during a real deadly pandemic breakout. The swine flu may be back. Next time it may be a lot more lethal. If, when it returns we are all under Obamacare – well, the White House may kill us all.
The tragedy is that this future disaster is easily avoidable with sensible healthcare reform.
FamilySecurityMatters.org Contributing Editor James Jay Carafano, Ph.D., is a leading expert in defense affaires, intelligence, military operations and strategy, and homeland security at the Heritage Foundation. Feedback: editorialdirector@familysecuritymatters.org.
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